Creating a WordPress Theme from Scratch: Adding Menus

As discussed in previous post, functions.php is automatically included in the processing of a theme. This is therefore the best place to add default settings that you want to a theme, as well as helper functions.

To make sure that a function is called on the initialisation of a theme you should use the following in the functions.php file:

Now I simply call get_menu(‘main_nav’); and it will either show nothing if the menu is blank or it will be the actual menu selected.

That is it for menus for now. Remember to check how WordPress outputs the menus and change the CSS to suit how you want it to. (e.g. by default it uses menu-top-menu as the class). Or you can use a custom class when calling wp_nav_menu():